


the brighter the stars

by Wingheart



Series: Dragon Madeline AU [2]
Category: Celeste (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Gen, and a bit that's new, but this idea was too funny to pass up, if you are reading this on an app like fanfic pocket archive you are being scammed, pre-chapter 9 i had dragon maddys main colour as cream not white, rated for: Mug, the Mug is an actual real mug that my editor/beta Disasternoj actually owns, the first chapter has a bit cut from the main story's summit ascent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-28 03:03:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20959403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wingheart/pseuds/Wingheart
Summary: Some fluff from the Dragon AU! Because it needed some fluff. Title is from Johannes Hager's The Darker The Sky. Will probably not make sense without reading the main multichapter dragon AU story.If you are reading this on an app like Fanfiction Pocket Archive, you are being scammed. Apps likes Fanfiction Pocket Archive are scraping AO3 to steal content from authors' accounts and are illegally profiting off of authors' work by having ads and subscription options. You can perfectly legally use AO3 for free and download work on AO3 for free without those apps. AO3 is also ad free. Those apps are a scam and are exploiting content creators.





	1. here to show the world to you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Title is from Aviators' Open Your Eyes

Madeline bounded forwards to land on a section of ruined wall that looked reasonably intact. Up above, she could see one of the Mountain’s stranger things: a winged strawberry. These had a tendency to fly away, so if she wanted it- and she _really_ wanted it, she’d eaten exactly one of the strawberries she’d found here and then resolved that she was going to use them to make the _best pie she possibly could_\- she’d have to be cautious and avoid using her dash if she could help it.

It was surprisingly easy, although she did have to resort to dashing twice in quick succession to catch it. 

As soon as she landed back on the platform, Badeline unfused from her. Madeline tried to hand her the strawberry so she could drop it in limbo or teleport off with it to where her bag was or whatever she did with the strawberries- Madeline didn’t ask but was sure she’d be able to use them in the pie- but she refused to take it.

“You should eat it.” 

Madeline stared at her doppelganger in utter confusion. “What.”

She huffed. “The wings. Eat them.” 

This didn’t actually clarify anything. In fact, it made things _more_ confusing.

“It’s...feathers?”

“Eat them.”

“But why!”

“Eat them!”

“They’re _feathers!_”

“They’re _strawberry, _and strawberries taste good. Eat them. In dragon form, because you’re not in dragon form enough, and also its mouth is bigger and it’ll be easier to eat the wings.”

Madeline wasn’t sure how long the absurd argument continued, but eventually she gave in. She sat down, shifted to dragon form, and took a bite out of the strawberry’s left wing. It tasted...well. Like feathers. After a bit of chewing, Madeline could identify other flavours; there was something meaty and coppery, like blood, and a definite bit of strawberry flavour, as well as another flavour she couldn’t name. It was also really crunchy.

Objectively, it was _bad_. Not the worst thing Madeline had ever eaten, but still bad.

The rest of the wing was less feathery. It was still not actually good.

Madeline handed the strawberry, other wing included, to her other self. Staring her dead in the eye, Badeline bit off the other wing and tried to eat it in one bite. Judging by the expression she made, she quickly realized that this was a bad idea. She had the sudden thought that Badeline was probably regretting not trying it _first_ before deciding to pester Madeline to eat it. It was, as far as Madeline was concerned, hilarious.

Madeline was still laughing at her when she returned from storing the strawberry.

“Stop it,” Badeline said, with no real anger. 

“I’m sorry! It’s just, your _face_ when you realized it was almost entirely feathers!”

“I should have tried it before making you eat it.”

“Why did you even make me try to eat it?”

“It looked tasty!”

Madeline sighed. It had not, in fact, looked tasty. 

________________________________

Madeline skidded to a stop in a small surviving section of a mostly-collapsed hotel room, snatching a winged strawberry out of the air just as her dash ended and narrowly missing bumping into a chair.

She could understand why this part of the hotel was particularly crumbled- it looked like it had once been a tower- and she could understand the black goop everywhere, but she could not figure out what all the springs were for. 

Holding out the still-flapping strawberry in front of her, she glared at it. “Had to jump an _obstacle course_ of narrow intact wall segments, goop, and springs to get you. Stop struggling, you’re a _fruit._”

The strawberry did not stop flapping aggressively. 

Badeline unfused- landing on the chair and reminding Madeline, for a moment, of a piece of artwork she’d seen once with a pet dromaeosaur hopping up on a couch- and grinned at her.

“Hey. Madeline. It can’t struggle if you eat it.”

Madeline glared. Badeline tried to maintain a mostly-straight face for a moment, then burst out laughing. 

______________________________

The climb down from the Summit was far, far easier than the ascent had been, for all that took place entirely in her still-unfamiliar dragon form. This was mostly because Madeline had found the actual trail at the last flag before the Summit, even if she _had_ ignored it to go in a straight line. Badeline teased her about it, of course; to Madeline’s surprise, the objectively not-particularly-funny teasing had her actually laughing.

She was glad of the far more gentle slope of the actual trail, but didn’t regret taking the route she had to reach the Summit. 

She still went off-trail a few times despite that. The trail had frequent switchbacks and detours, going around cliffs and drops and patches of crystal that Madeline could simply jump or dash. Badeline floated behind her, like the world’s strangest and most conversational balloon. 

Madeline took the descent at a walk. There was no point running on the way down; she was still tired from the climb, and if she stopped her legs started trembling. Also, this way, she had plenty of time to talk to Badeline. And talk they did, about anything and everything that came to mind. They had a _lot_ to work through. 

Sometimes, Badeline would say something so deeply strange that it took Madeline a while to wrap her head around it. Sometimes this was because it was a concept that English might not have the words for at all, like details of her dual existence as both part of Madeline and her own person. Sometimes it was about dragon-specific things, where she didn’t know the words because she’d been avoiding the dragon community her entire life. 

And sometimes it was confusing, almost dreamlike, barely-coherent sentences about the causes of recurring nightmares and fears. Badeline was clearly _trying_ to get her point across, but sometimes struggled to get the concepts into words; Madeline didn’t blame her, but it did sometimes make conversation difficult.

Less than twenty seconds after leaving the Mirror Temple, Madeline found herself staring over a small hot spring. She _could_ have just followed the trail around it, but instead, she turned to Badeline. She didn’t even have time to do more than think about fusing before Badeline was rushing towards her, and leapt before the slight rush of warmth from her fusion was even over. As she dashed over the pond, she thought she noticed something pink in the water; once she landed, Badeline immediately unfused and went to go look. Nothing but her purple-maned reflection.

Shrugging, they continued onwards.

Not long after, Badeline landed beside her and started walking alongside rather than floating behind, hands in her pockets and looking for all the world like she didn’t care. Madeline was touched. 

As the gondola was broken and they were _not_ taking the gauntlet of spikes, bubbles, and clouds they’d used as a shortcut in reverse, they had to take the long way down Golden Ridge. It was a lot longer than the short route, and Badeline eventually just _stopped_, pausing by an old, bare, oddly purple tree to catch her breath. Madeline decided that she had the right idea and flopped down to take a break.

As soon as Badeline had caught her breath, she teased Madeline about it. Madeline didn’t dignify it with an answer. The last of her bag of trail mix was a _much_ more important thing to pay attention to.

(Badeline eventually stopped laughing at her to dunk her entire muzzle into the bag to lick off one singular stuck bit of cheese. Madeline sighed and wondered why the part of her that wanted to do things like that had wound up in Badeline.)

Near the end of the Ridge, they encountered more bouncy clouds, which entirely derailed their discussion about whether or not Madeline should buy a potted plant in favour of bouncing on them like a trampoline. It was _fun_, in a way Madeline hadn’t felt in years. Badeline approached it like a fictional mad scientist approaching the idea of adding explosives to everything: with an almost manic vigour and intense focus. 

When they eventually grew tired of bouncing on clouds, Badeline brought up the possibility of using them for flying lessons.

It couldn’t be _that_ hard, thought Madeline. She clearly had the instincts to at least maintain a glide path if starting from a height, she’d fought them when she...fell.

Madeline quickly discovered that instincts or not, she couldn’t fly. Flapping fast enough to maintain her speed seemed to take more effort than she could reliably manage. Her wings seemed to want to sweep up and stay up; a downstroke fast enough to be of any use felt like trying to swing a reasonably sized piece of sheet metal through water, fast, and it made her chest ache from the effort. Even keeping her wings spread and open was a bit of a challenge. After five attempts, Badeline was forced to concede that her _technique_ was fine- she was starting to get the hang of steering with her tail- but her wing strength was just too low. 

Sighing, Madeline picked herself up and kept going. She could work on her flight muscles later. Now was a time for talking to the rest of her, planning a little “we did it!” party, and heading back down the Mountain.

By the time she’d reached the crumbling hotel, the sun had moved noticeably across the sky. The first thing she noticed was that all the goop had gone, except for a lone bit of goop trying and failing to fit a replacement window. The second thing she noticed was that, without the goop, many holes in the walls were exposed- like the goop had been hiding them. She felt a little sorry for Mr Oshiro... but only a little. 

The old castle wasn’t far away, but by the time she got there, it was definitely evening. Madeline had run out of snacks and tried to get into the old information center to see if she could get any more, but it was locked. Climbing onto the roof revealed nothing useful. Madeline took the chance for a break, and Badeline decided it was a good idea to show off her duplication powers, spinning around Madeline a triplicate circle that she couldn’t help but try to track with her head until she was forced to sit down by the dizziness. Badeline laughed at her, and Madeline found herself chuckling along.

Perched on the old information center, Madeline spotted her distorted reflection out of the corner of her eye. She hadn’t really looked at herself very much in dragon form in a long time, and she squinted trying to make out the details. Badeline landed next to her, tried to peer over her shoulder, and then fused with a huff.

Squinting at her reflection, Madeline couldn’t really see much different than what Badeline looked like, aside from the colour scheme; the shiny metal surface she was looking at distorted the colours, but her jacket was blue to Badeline’s purple, most of her feathers were white to Badeline’s pale lavender, and her hair was pink to Badeline’s purple and Madeline’s usual red.

Madeline paused. Stared at her reflection some more. Thought on the colour scheme for a moment. 

Then she snatched a handful of mane feathers and practically yanked them down, twisting around to look at the still gently swaying mane feathers and her jacket and her white wing-arm feathers all at once.

_She was a walking trans flag._

Madeline laughed so hard she fell off the roof.


	2. something i would've never seen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains A Mug and is set during the summer Theo spends in Vancouver with Madeline! Chapter title is from Thousand Foot Krutch's Be Somebody, again.

Madeline glanced up from her tailfan preening at the sound of someone knocking on her bedroom door. Usually she preened in the bathroom, since the sink was _right there_ and so it was fast to rinse the preen oil off of her hands when she was done, but with Theo over she didn’t want to hog the bathroom with feather care.

“Come in?”, she said, somewhat confused. Theo had been reading a book on his phone, and he’d been staying over for a few days already so he knew where everything was; Madeline couldn’t think of anything he’d be knocking on her door for.

Theo peered into her room. “You have a package? Another one of those mystery packages from the robot bobcat company.”

That explained it. Madeline carefully set the tonglike preening comb down, and clambered out of the pillow-and-blanket nest she’d assembled on her bed. Time to see what semi-random object she’d been sent this time. She couldn’t deny that she was a bit excited.

(The past five were a cheap and slightly too small shirt with a guitar-playing glittery dragon skeleton on it, the orange-scented preen oil she’d been using, a rock with googly eyes glued to it, a record of birds singing, and a set of stickers. It was a surprisingly effective way to get around her lingering anxiety about buying anything.)

Madeline had taken to picking up the rocks she’d collected from Mount Celeste and balancing them on her back or shoulders while she opened the packages; the lingering magic in the rocks combined with her own dragon magic to let Badeline unfuse, for a short period of time, and they could talk about whatever item she’d gotten this time. 

It was a massive mug, apparently made out of metal of some sort. As she extracted it from its slightly excessive packaging, grateful for her dragon-form’s claws, Madeline noticed that the handle appeared to be based off of a scaly dragon, with ridging down their back. Interesting. Also interesting was the celtic-knot pattern near the top of the mug, the four, smooth, red gems below that with more celtic-knot patterns surrounding them, and the fact that it seemed to have four dragons on it.

Then Madeline got it entirely out of the packaging and went to actually look at the dragons. It was a repeating pattern, with the dragons facing each other in pairs. They were scaley, six-limbed quadrupeds. All of them were holding their wings in such a way that it covered their behinds, which only made it more apparent that none of them had a stitch of clothing on.

Madeline stared, trying to process what she was holding. Badeline revealed that she had unfused at some point by gently taking the mug off her.

“Why...do they have no clothes on.” Madeline said, faintly and flatly. Somewhere, Theo snickered.

“It’s artistic nudity,” Badeline said confidently. Theo sounded like he was trying his hardest not to laugh harder. 

“Who ships...dragon hentai mugs…” Madeline mumbled, staring at where the mug had been.

“Look, nothing is showing. There’s wings in the way.”

Madeline could tell that Badeline was showing Theo, who was laughing harder now. She shifted her blank, almost betrayed-looking stare to Badeline, who was blushing a sort of magenta colour but otherwise appeared to not care at all that the mug she was holding had images of _naked dragons_ on it, then abruptly shifted to human form, as if she could pretend not to be associated with her other self. She was distantly aware that she was blushing as hard as Badeline was. Possibly harder, as most of Badeline’s face was currently covered in opaque scales, with only a relatively small section around her eyes and mouth that was translucent enough to tint in a blush.

“Don’t be such a _greenhorn_.” Badeline said to Madeline, with just a trace of the scorn that she used to use so often. 

Madeline buried her face in her hands. Her cheeks and ears were burning. “IT’S A DRAGON HENTAI MUG!” she wailed.

Theo completely lost it.

“Honestly,” said Badeline, “at this size it’s more of a tankard.”

Madeline made a vaguely whining noise of embarrassed distress.

“Also,” Badeline continued, “It’s not hentai. It’s just risque. It’s not explicit enough to be hentai.” 

Madeline thought she was going to spontaneously combust from embarrassment. 

“Who _makes_ dragon...risque tankards?” Madeline whimper-moaned.

“I don’t have the _slightest_ clue,” Badeline said loftily, then went to go put the mug in the cupboard, leaving Madeline to make peace with the fact that her future contained the Naked Dragons Mug.

Theo was still laughing- the intermittent laugh of someone laughing too hard to properly breathe- and Madeline wondered what she had possibly done to deserve _this_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The site Madeline uses for semi-random purchases is bobcatinabox.com.


End file.
